Proxy Conflicts
Matthew Parris writing in The Times has a hopeful view that something positive may come out of the Flight MH17 as it made its way across the skies over Ukraine.
I'm not so sure because there's no sign as yet at least of President Putin facing up to the horrific crime that has been committed and Russia's complicity in the whole affair.
But who knows, maybe it is possible that reason will prevail and that a peaceful solution can be found which allows Ukraine to find its own way in the world without Russia treating the country as if it were still a proxy, satellite state.
Ukraine gains from Flight MH17. Russia loses
By Matthew Parris - The Times
Assuming Russian approval, trigger-happy separatists killed the wrong people. Putin must be furious and very worried
It was a strange feeling after take-off, leaving Iraq on a commercial flight not long after the US-led invasion. Our passenger jet began corkscrewing up into the sky, tightly banked, keeping the airfield security zone beneath us, until we were high enough to escape shoulder-launched pot shots.
Add heat-seeking technology, radar and portable launchers, and Flight MH17’s fate begins to look like the same plan writ huge. As TV pictures of the carnage and destruction ricochet around screens worldwide, any prime minister, any security chief, must be asking themselves who else is watching. This could be a jihadist’s dream.
Not so fast, the experts tell us. The editor of IHS Jane’s International Defence Review, says: “This is not the sort of thing that you or I could scramble together to operate. It needs a trained crew. This suggests it could have been a partially trained crew.” Partially reassuring, I suppose, for now; but after what happened on Thursday, millions of airline passengers will fly with just a twinge of concern we never felt before.
Because this is, first, a human story. There will be much in the media this weekend about people, about shock and about grief. If, for this columnist, the politics intrudes, that is not because the human tragedy is not foremost in every mind, but because this atrocity is also of profound political importance.
For Vladimir Putin it is a political catastrophe. International hooligans deserve neither sympathy nor understanding, but that should not distract us from trying for a moment to put ourselves in the Russian president’s shoes. It is hard to imagine how Mr Putin’s malicious meddling in eastern Ukraine could have gone more hideously wrong for him. If the vocabulary of gain and loss can be used in so macabre a context, Ukraine gains from this disaster. Russia loses. You can discount any thought that anyone in Moscow is crowing.
For it was, in a vile way, a sort of accident. The separatists killed the wrong people. We can be pretty sure nobody — neither the Kremlin nor the Ukrainian separatists — intended to bring down a civilian flight.
Caution is therefore in order. We British have little to contribute beyond a publicly stated and privately emphasised preference for calm. David Cameron’s statement yesterday, after talking to the Dutch prime minister, was notably careful. While the urgent investigation proceeds, shouting at people will solve nothing. For a British prime minister reticence is easy, but Barack Obama will be in an awful bind, with both Democrats and Republicans, for whom talk is easy, demanding more muscular language from their president. Senator John McCain is at it already.
Yet it would be highly undesirable to back Moscow into a corner. Though the Ukrainian separatists may have presumed Russian approval with their trigger-happy approach, Mr Putin will now be furious and deeply worried. Responsible diplomacy would seek to build on a potential cooling between Moscow and the separatists, not try to drive them back into each other’s arms. Already Mr Putin is calling for a ceasefire and talks. This should not be dismissed.
The Russian president doesn’t really know what he wants in Ukraine. He knows what he does not want. He does not want a huge, free, democratic, economically successful and relatively uncorrupt near-neighbour. For a bullying demagogue, comparisons are odious.
He does not want Ukraine entering the European Union, not least because in the Kremlin’s mind the EU, Nato and “the West” are somewhat (if illogically) conflated.
And Russia certainly does not want Ukraine in Nato. The Kremlin sees Nato as a clenched fist. It is possible to understand this fear, even if we think it paranoid.
What, then, does Mr Putin want? To gain a total grip? But to do this Moscow would have to bring the whole of Ukraine back to heel: probably the heel of another Kremlin puppet as leader; and the Kremlin must wonder whether it would be practical or affordable to reassert this kind of control. Too many Ukrainians (including many Russian-speaking Ukrainians who will have been disgusted by this atrocity) like the taste of freedom they now have.
So Mr Putin has been driven back to what he thought the safe option, the blood-letting strategy: harrying, weakening and wounding from outside, and by proxy — the proxy being the Ukrainian separatists. This is how the Americans bled the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, their proxy being the Mujahidin, and to a certain rather stupid kind of realpolitik mind it’s fearfully clever. On Thursday Mr Putin experienced the limit of that cleverness, as the Americans are still experiencing it in Afghanistan. You stir things up, then lose control of what you have stirred.
The fate of Flight MH17 presents every political player with huge problems: every player, perhaps, except Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president. What can Mr Obama do? How far will the Netherlands want to go and how far will Germany allow the EU to go? Which way should Moscow turn?
To list, like this, the relevant questions is not the cop-out it may seem, because I believe some of them are not without answers. No way is the EU going to admit Ukraine as a member and no way could Nato do so, and the Russians need to understand that. Maybe we should tell them. In return for that reassurance Moscow must accept that Kiev is never coming back and Kiev must accept that the Crimea is never coming back.
What happened on Thursday scared everyone. It will have scared Mr Putin, though he will never admit it. Horror at this glimpse of where events could lead has been shared on all sides. In that shared horror I do see a sliver of hope. There is scope for climbing down. I doubt this is the likelihood, but it is possible.
To some problems there seem to be no answers. This weekend Israel’s attacks on Gaza continue — and none of us can honestly suggest a solution that the two respective leaderships could sell to their own supporters. But not every crisis is insoluble, not every flashpoint is beyond dousing. For all its sheer horror — and partly because of its sheer horror — the catastrophe of Flight MH17 may point a way back from the brink. If it proved the thunderclap that shocked everyone to their senses, some hope might emerge from the despair.
Assuming Russian approval, trigger-happy separatists killed the wrong people. Putin must be furious and very worried
It was a strange feeling after take-off, leaving Iraq on a commercial flight not long after the US-led invasion. Our passenger jet began corkscrewing up into the sky, tightly banked, keeping the airfield security zone beneath us, until we were high enough to escape shoulder-launched pot shots.
Add heat-seeking technology, radar and portable launchers, and Flight MH17’s fate begins to look like the same plan writ huge. As TV pictures of the carnage and destruction ricochet around screens worldwide, any prime minister, any security chief, must be asking themselves who else is watching. This could be a jihadist’s dream.
Not so fast, the experts tell us. The editor of IHS Jane’s International Defence Review, says: “This is not the sort of thing that you or I could scramble together to operate. It needs a trained crew. This suggests it could have been a partially trained crew.” Partially reassuring, I suppose, for now; but after what happened on Thursday, millions of airline passengers will fly with just a twinge of concern we never felt before.
Because this is, first, a human story. There will be much in the media this weekend about people, about shock and about grief. If, for this columnist, the politics intrudes, that is not because the human tragedy is not foremost in every mind, but because this atrocity is also of profound political importance.
For Vladimir Putin it is a political catastrophe. International hooligans deserve neither sympathy nor understanding, but that should not distract us from trying for a moment to put ourselves in the Russian president’s shoes. It is hard to imagine how Mr Putin’s malicious meddling in eastern Ukraine could have gone more hideously wrong for him. If the vocabulary of gain and loss can be used in so macabre a context, Ukraine gains from this disaster. Russia loses. You can discount any thought that anyone in Moscow is crowing.
For it was, in a vile way, a sort of accident. The separatists killed the wrong people. We can be pretty sure nobody — neither the Kremlin nor the Ukrainian separatists — intended to bring down a civilian flight.
Caution is therefore in order. We British have little to contribute beyond a publicly stated and privately emphasised preference for calm. David Cameron’s statement yesterday, after talking to the Dutch prime minister, was notably careful. While the urgent investigation proceeds, shouting at people will solve nothing. For a British prime minister reticence is easy, but Barack Obama will be in an awful bind, with both Democrats and Republicans, for whom talk is easy, demanding more muscular language from their president. Senator John McCain is at it already.
Yet it would be highly undesirable to back Moscow into a corner. Though the Ukrainian separatists may have presumed Russian approval with their trigger-happy approach, Mr Putin will now be furious and deeply worried. Responsible diplomacy would seek to build on a potential cooling between Moscow and the separatists, not try to drive them back into each other’s arms. Already Mr Putin is calling for a ceasefire and talks. This should not be dismissed.
The Russian president doesn’t really know what he wants in Ukraine. He knows what he does not want. He does not want a huge, free, democratic, economically successful and relatively uncorrupt near-neighbour. For a bullying demagogue, comparisons are odious.
He does not want Ukraine entering the European Union, not least because in the Kremlin’s mind the EU, Nato and “the West” are somewhat (if illogically) conflated.
And Russia certainly does not want Ukraine in Nato. The Kremlin sees Nato as a clenched fist. It is possible to understand this fear, even if we think it paranoid.
What, then, does Mr Putin want? To gain a total grip? But to do this Moscow would have to bring the whole of Ukraine back to heel: probably the heel of another Kremlin puppet as leader; and the Kremlin must wonder whether it would be practical or affordable to reassert this kind of control. Too many Ukrainians (including many Russian-speaking Ukrainians who will have been disgusted by this atrocity) like the taste of freedom they now have.
So Mr Putin has been driven back to what he thought the safe option, the blood-letting strategy: harrying, weakening and wounding from outside, and by proxy — the proxy being the Ukrainian separatists. This is how the Americans bled the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, their proxy being the Mujahidin, and to a certain rather stupid kind of realpolitik mind it’s fearfully clever. On Thursday Mr Putin experienced the limit of that cleverness, as the Americans are still experiencing it in Afghanistan. You stir things up, then lose control of what you have stirred.
The fate of Flight MH17 presents every political player with huge problems: every player, perhaps, except Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president. What can Mr Obama do? How far will the Netherlands want to go and how far will Germany allow the EU to go? Which way should Moscow turn?
To list, like this, the relevant questions is not the cop-out it may seem, because I believe some of them are not without answers. No way is the EU going to admit Ukraine as a member and no way could Nato do so, and the Russians need to understand that. Maybe we should tell them. In return for that reassurance Moscow must accept that Kiev is never coming back and Kiev must accept that the Crimea is never coming back.
What happened on Thursday scared everyone. It will have scared Mr Putin, though he will never admit it. Horror at this glimpse of where events could lead has been shared on all sides. In that shared horror I do see a sliver of hope. There is scope for climbing down. I doubt this is the likelihood, but it is possible.
To some problems there seem to be no answers. This weekend Israel’s attacks on Gaza continue — and none of us can honestly suggest a solution that the two respective leaderships could sell to their own supporters. But not every crisis is insoluble, not every flashpoint is beyond dousing. For all its sheer horror — and partly because of its sheer horror — the catastrophe of Flight MH17 may point a way back from the brink. If it proved the thunderclap that shocked everyone to their senses, some hope might emerge from the despair.
